Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Fixing Keyboard Type Problems

Macs normally have one of three different physical keyboard types, which Apple calls JIS (for Japan), ISO (used in Europe, for example) and ANSI (used in the US). ISO has one key more than ANSI -- it is located between z and shift -- and JIS has quite a few differences.

Sometimes a machine will forget which type keyboard is attached, with the result that certain keys get transposed from what the user expects. The fix for this is run the Keyboard Setup Assistant again. Sometimes there is a button for "Change Keyboard Type" visible in System Preferences/Keyboard. If not, you can try trashing the file

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

Another possibility may be to open Terminal and type:

sudo open /System/Library/CoreServices/KeyboardSetupAssistant.app/Contents/MacOS/KeyboardSetupAssistant

That's true about China. I lived for a few years. They use the ANSI with pinyin input. Some actually have radicals on the keyboard, but still have the pinyin.

I didn't know the different physical keyboards until I just bought the Apple small bluetooth keyboard in Jordan. It's ISO. Not only is there an additional key between the Shift and Z, but the key above and right of Enter is the left half of the place of Enter. Enter becomes a tall skinny key. This took some getting used to. It makes no sense to me. I'm sure it does in certain usages.

I have been having a weird problem with Chinese input recently, which may be connected to this post. In case you have an idea of what is happening, here is my story:

I have a Japanese iMac (27", bought in Jan. 2010), with JIS keyboard, and uses Japanese as my default locale. However, I type often in French and sometimes in Chinese, so I enabled the French layout and the Chinese Pinyin one. When French layout is enabled (i.e., ticked in the "Language and Text" input source menu), then the layout used for Chinese is the French one, which can be confirmed by launching the "keyboard viewer". However, if I untick French in the input source menu, then the layout used for the Pinyin mode goes back to US...

This is very annoying, as French keyboards are not really designed to type Pinyin efficiently, plus I need to blind type :)

In general, I find the language usage in OS X not that intuitive. For example, I haven't figured out a way to select my "default" input layout, i.e., the layout which will be used when a new application is opened. Sometimes it seems to be French by default, sometimes Romaji (which I would prefer and that I would expect, as Japanese is my default locale), and I couldn't figure out the rationale, and it didn't seem to be related to the last layout I used before shutting the application. I use the option to have a different layout for each document, but I don't see why this should influence the above, unless that it becomes really painful to change each and every window (and even each field in Firefox!) back to Romaji separately...

Jonathan -- Do you really like using AZERTY to type French? If not, it is not hard using either US or US International PC instead, which might solve your problem. Best to email me for further advice (tom at bluesky dot org).

Hi I have exactly the problem you describe: my Mac mini has forgotten the keyboard and there is no Change keyboard type button visible in sys preferences/keyboard. There is no file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist to trash and running the sudo command gives me the message no known keyboard (it's a French MS Comfort curve, recognised in the initial startup). The keyboard viewer shows me a key layout for French - numerical that is quite incorrect (eg no < key next to the shift key)Any ideas what to try next so that I can run the keyboard setup assistant ?Thanks